In practice I’ve found it more practical to create cloud VMs although I’ve traditionally used run a Linux and Windows VM on MacBooks. Or just buy a tiny server for a few hundred bucks and leave it plugged in at home and remote into that.
There’s too many issues around ARM support and the fact that other Linux and Windows machines generally won’t be running ARM. Apple Silicon also has expensive memory upgrades.
Remote Desktop to a virtualized Windows 10 running on VMWare ESXi is what I replaced VMWare Fusion with even before I got this M1. It's unlikely I'll ever upgrade now.
This only works if you have a good internet connection. The use case I've always had for VMWare Fusion is that I need to use a Windows app, as if it were local, with my local, multi-gig, files available.
RDP is really quite impressive. I host Windows VMs on a Linux server. With quickemu[0] you can fire up a Windows Vm in minutes. It fetches the ISO, sets everything up - even breezes through setup, creates a user, does KMS for activation, etc. One command and a few minutes later you're looking at a Windows desktop. Setup Remote Desktop (with SSH forwarding or VPN of course) and you have a remarkably responsive (even at 4k single and dual display) GUI experience and powerful remote connection - file sharing, sound forwarding, clipboard sharing, even printers and arbitrary devices.
Well in my case, it’s running on an EC2 instance with no ingress access. I access it by tunneling through Session Manager secured via IAM temporary credentials which itself is secured via a physical MFA device.
Hah totally get your sentiment but in my case it’s a port forward bound to loop back to a VM listening on a very well secured Linux machine only accessible with key based SSH. I’m not terribly worried about it.
If you're using a Windows app as part of your Mac workflow (which is often the case if Fusion is being used), you'll put files in a shared mount so the Mac and Windows apps have access to the storage they're on. This doesn't work if you have to transfer files across the internet to start the Windows side of your workflow.
For example, a Windows reporting tool that reads from an sqlite database, which was generated with a Mac workflow, while I'm sitting at a coffee shop.
And, the nicest thing about fusion is that each Windows app appears as a native window, which RDP doesn't seem to have.
There’s too many issues around ARM support and the fact that other Linux and Windows machines generally won’t be running ARM. Apple Silicon also has expensive memory upgrades.